


I never shook my shadow

by cosmogony (findingkairos)



Series: we were faster on our feet [3]
Category: Final Fantasy XV, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Child Soldiers, Cor Leonis Whump, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Destructive Behavior, Loyalty, Master of Death Harry Potter, Recovery, Self-Doubt, Whump, a pinch of comfort, slow burn found family, the wreckage of a centuries old war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-04
Updated: 2020-06-04
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:46:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24531760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/findingkairos/pseuds/cosmogony
Summary: You are a weapon, and weapons do not weep.Somewhere between settling down at the Rock and Cor's eighteenth birthday, Cor starts to unlearn bad habits, Harry succumbs the joys of stress-knitting, and Gil actually cooks something from this century, though not necessarily in that order.
Relationships: Gilgamesh (Final Fantasy XV) & Cor Leonis, Harry Potter & Cor Leonis
Series: we were faster on our feet [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1757932
Comments: 34
Kudos: 481





	I never shook my shadow

**Author's Note:**

> ( _can you hear it?_ — the song of a bird and a grave not yours)
> 
> An interlude before/during/after Chapter 3 of _the wind will set me racing_ , which is set in M.E. 728.

Here was a message that Cor Leonis had internalized: _You are a weapon, and weapons do not weep._

_Everything you are is by the grace of the Royal Family._

_You should be grateful._

The catch of it was, he was grateful. He really was. Even after his discharge from the Crownsguard; even after his dismissal from the Retinue. At least he’d been able to serve to the best of his ability, though it hadn’t been enough.

No matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried, there was always another wave of troopers. There was always a higher casualty tally. Cor skidded and ducked and rolled and hacked and crawled his way across the warfront, and it was never enough. Not enough for the Royal Family, and not enough for him.

Because the entire point of his service was that Royals did not fight. They stayed behind in their Citadel and handed down orders, because in the hierarchy of a military the chain of command was the only thing holding the entire thing together. They were generals, and they gave the foot soldiers their orders, and Cor Leonis had never forgotten, not even once, just which one he was.

King Mors had let him do his job, because he understood what it was to be in the Crownsguard and serve. Prince Regis had been uncomfortable at first, but he’d come to accept it, after the first time Cor had waded through the battlefield for him.

He had washed Cor’s hands afterwards, even though he’d protested it was unnecessary. He’d bandaged the wounds where he’d not been fast enough – not good enough – to dodge cleanly; he’d helped Cor wash his hair.

The Prince’s Advisor, Weskham Armaugh, had helped him clean his weapons afterwards. Cor hadn’t understood that, either, but it was easier to let superior officers do what they want. And there was no doubt that the Prince of Lucis and his Advisor were superior officers; he didn’t need his Crownsguard trainers to tell him that.

Here was a secret that he’d never tell Harry, though he was sure that Gilgamesh had at least guessed at it: he’d gone to Taelpar Crag in the hopes that at last, this would be the thing to kill him. If he could not die in service for his country and the ones he’d bled and bled others for, then Six, at least let him die trying to get better.

At least let him die for _something_ , instead of washing up and washing out.

Past Cor had been half-right and half-wrong. Harry was like Regis, in all the best ways; but he was also nothing like Regis, in all the worst ways. He never slowed down, he never stopped, he never sat back and let Cor do his damn job.

He washed Cor’s hands after, too. He helped wash his hair. He let Cor sleep at the foot of his sleeping bag on nights when his hands were sore from clutching at his katana.

He made time for the orphans of Lucis like Regis had never been able to do.

The magic was different. It was more potent, more mutable, more flexible; Harry managed things that Cor would have thought a hallucination. Not just fire or light, but healing, illusions, and the weirdest two-horned mesmerize-shaped thing that Cor had ever seen. An odd mix of Lucis Caelum and Nox Fleuret domains, as though he had the heritage of both in his bloodline.

He couldn’t share his magic yet, but he was working on it, discussing terms and theories with Death and putting them into practice during the night. Eventually he came to the decision that the types of magic that Cor was used to – drawn from the Crystal, allowing him access to the Armiger, fire and lightning and ice spells – was something he would have to follow in the footsteps of all the Lucis Caelum before him for and go to the Crystal.

But he could share his curiously always-deeper bags, make Cor’s room bigger on the inside, wave his fingers over Cor’s service pistol and let it never run out of bullets.

People asked, just once, why Cor wasn’t going to the tiny local school.

“It’s no use,” Cor had said, and there’d been no bitterness in it, no grief. Just the ease of long acceptance. “I won’t need it.”

“Why won’t you need it? Everyone needs calculus eventually.”

“I’ll always be out here,” he’d said, and waved his hand to indicate the greens of Cleigne. The warfront, the smoke on the horizon, the distant clashing of blades. “And I’ll probably die out here. So.”

In a country that had seen centuries of war with no end in sight, such a statement was met with knowing nods and resigned grimaces.

But Harry had not grown up here. Harry had waged a war and won it. He would not accept this; not for Cor, not for the other orphans running on the streets of Ravatogh, not for the children turning into weapons for the war machine of Lucis. He could tell, because Harry’s eyes had widened and he’d looked like he’d been shot, in the split second before he wiped the expression off his face.

Cor didn’t know if he should be grateful for the fact that Harry never made him go to school. He knew all his letters and numbers; he could write reports and read briefings and calculate how long he could stretch out his budget for food. He didn’t need to learn anything more than that when he’d just be wasting the teacher’s time.

Harry took up a hobby, which he called knitting. Cor had heard of both terms before. A hobby was something civilians had, and knitting was something the elderly did.

He was terribly bad at it. The entire time Harry was working on his first project, Cor thought it was a net made of inappropriate material. Yarn was easy to cut through; garotte wire would be better, and barbed wire even better than that.

It took him a long while to finish it, too. He stared at it sometimes, when Cor was doing weapons maintenance on the floor of the den and Harry was sitting above him on the sofa. He scowled like it had personally offended him, his fingers drumming on the cushions, tangled on the skein of deep gold yarn.

But one evening, he gestured Cor over. When Cor settled into parade rest in front of Harry as directed, the man dropped it on his head and tugged it around his ears. Cor stood still and let Harry do what he wanted, tugging at the thing first at his left ear, and then the right, frowning and adjusting the entire time.

“I think that’s as good as it’s going to get, sorry,” he sighed, and leaned back.

Cor didn’t understand. The _What?_ caught in his throat and snagged on his tongue.

Thank the Six, Harry didn’t catch his lapse. “But it looks vaguely hat-shaped! So I’ll take it. What do you think, Cor?”

A hat?

Cor reached up slowly to touch it with the tips of his fingers. It was a little scratchy, the same sensation on his ears, but he could feel going all the way around his head. His skull was warming up under it, the layer of hair turning into insulation instead of the sole defense against heat loss in winter.

“It’s warm,” he said, for lack of anything else to say. But it seemed it’d been the right thing, because Harry’s face broke into a smile, as wide and as brilliant and as unfetteredly happy as Cor had ever seen him, and he wished he could bottle up that joy and happiness – all directed at Cor! – into something he could keep.

He thought, in that endless moment, something that he had held onto because the one time that Cor had insisted that Harry use and leverage him as he was meant to be used Harry had been hand-tremblingly angry, and yet he could not stop himself from thinking: _I would kill for you_.

Afterwards, when Harry was asleep and the house was quiet and Cor was relatively sure that Gil would not kill him, he asked the spirit why he’d let Cor live when everyone knew that those who went into Taelpar Crag never returned.

Gilgamesh, the First Shield, Guardian of the Tempering Grounds, looked at him in the eye, and Cor froze up. He froze like he was a rookie dumped into basic, a raw recruit who had no idea what he was doing, he froze and Gilgamesh walked forward and reached out his hand and–

Did not kill him.

Gilgamesh put his hand on Cor’s shoulder and squeezed. “Because you did not seek glory,” he said, and then he walked away.

Cor was definitely going to outlive King Mors. It was likely he was going to outlive Prince Regis; the burden of the Ring of Lucii and the maintenance of the Wall was heavy and shortened lives.

He was glad – selfishly glad, some nights – that Harry was refusing to claim his birthright and be declared a Prince of Lucis. Because no matter the fact that Cor wanted to tear out his hair at the frustration of a royal refusing the protections that being public about it offered, no matter the fact that _Death itself had wanted him to have them_ , it meant that Cor wouldn’t have to watch him waste away powering a magical defense array to maintain a holding pattern.

If the gods were good, Harry could spend his days as a pseudo-retired Hunter, knitting socks and failing to teach Cor how to garden. He would never have to pick up another weapon again, not when Cor was still here and able and willing to do it for him.

Sitting in the sun, watching Harry as the man patiently explained for the fifth time how to weed and care for the cherry tomatoes, Cor wanted to believe the gods were good.

The den’s floor became cluttered with wicker baskets of skeins of yarn. Deep blue, spring green, pale orange like the dawn.

If there was red, it was more pink or pale or purple than true red. Cor watched Harry pick over his colors for his projects; he never repeated the same set of colors. If he was ever bothered by the lack of red, he didn’t ever show it.

He worked with both hands, too. Cor leaned against the bottom of the couch and looked up to watch Harry work, all rhythmic and economic movements, his wrists flicking and his hands moving in an intricate dance. He made scarves and hats and mittens and scarves and hats again, and in the middle of it, between a Royal-black sweater and an intricately flower-patterned scarf, he asked for the hat he’d made Cor so that he could fix it.

Cor didn’t know what sort of sound he made, except that it was the sound he always made when he was on the field and the soldier in front of him was refusing to die and _he_ refused to die, not there, not then, because he still had work to do.

Harry went wide-eyed, and Cor realized the extent of the mistake he had made and the insult he had given to one of the _royal blood_ , but he was on the floor already so he couldn’t bow, there were wicker baskets everywhere so he couldn’t _kneel_ properly, and he was working on getting up so that he could make room to do – something, he didn’t know what, when Harry gently took his hand.

Said, in the voice he used with the stray dogs in the evening, “If you like it the way it is, then it’s fine.”

 _It’s fine_ , Cor repeated in his own head, and held onto Harry’s hand, and repeated it until it sounded true.

More people joined them. Dave Auburnbrie, son of the Head of the Hunters; Finn, an orphan turned street kid who knew Ravatogh inside and out; Aggie, who had been an unlucky civilian stuck in the trenches of the warfront when the Imperials came knocking, and who’d survived by the virtue of knowing the wilderness of Cleigne like the back of her hand.

They all looked at Harry and they were smart, they could and did connect the dots. Cor outlined the plan of attack in his head: he’d need to go after Auburnbrie first, probably in a dark corner somewhere, leave no evidence for Ezma Auburnbrie to suspect foul play in the death of her son. Finn and Aggie were orphans and had no one left who would care if they up and disappeared.

He could make it clean. He could make it quick. He could kill them and feel no remorse for it, not when their loose tongues would compromise Harry’s safety.

And then Dave came to him, the two others at his side, all three of them bright-eyed and steel-spined and iron-willed. They knew who Harry was, and who Cor was, and still wanted to make their positions here permanent.

Cor could understand the feeling. He’d been one of them, long ago. He still was, even now.

They wanted to swear an oath. Not the Retinue’s Oath, because the Six knew that Harry was still refusing to hear it from anyone younger than eighteen, and right now Cor was the oldest of the bunch.

But the Retinue’s Oath was not the only kind of vow that could be sworn to one of royal blood. Half of them were meant for adults; all of them were inappropriate for the sentiments Cor could see gleaming in their eyes.

In the end it was Gilgamesh who had the solution. “Make up your own,” he grunted, and watched the ones sparring with sharp eyes. “You won’t find something that’ll fit, because they were all made for other people.”

Other people, Gilgamesh said. Not _Not for you_ ; not _You think it’s your place to do this?_

“The three most important things,” Cor told a determined Dave, “are that you promise to keep his confidence, watch his back, and listen to him.”

“And to stand by him,” Dave added, and smiled when Cor blinked at him. “Prince Regis came by and tried to help out Ma with the monsters behind the sealed doors, remember? You were there.”

Cor remembered. He hadn’t realized that Dave and his mother remembered, which was a stupid, awful mistake that a raw rookie should have made, not a Crownsguard or Retinue with years of experience under his belt.

But Dave was right. “And to stand by him,” Cor confirmed, and it felt right.

He wasn’t Crownsguard anymore, but gods be good, he was going to be Retinue again, and that would have to be good enough.

Cor was not blind, nor deaf, nor dumb. He knew what Harry did when the man thought the house was asleep. He knew there was a reason Ravatogh was seeing a sharp decline in the number of daemons that prowled beyond the edge of light.

If Harry was going to be stubborn about it, then Cor would just have to pre-empt him.

The daemons stuck to the outer boundaries of Ravatogh, hissing at the night lights. Cor waited until Harry’s breathing down the corridor had smoothed out into true sleep, and slipped from his bed to grab his katana. It was comforting to stomp into his combat boots and holster his sword, check the laces of his bracers and the smaller knives he kept there.

Thank whichever of the Six was watching him, Gilgamesh did not stop him as he left the house. The town was quiet; judging from the position of the moon, it was a few hours past midnight. There was enough time before dawn.

It was easy to fall back into the pace of things. It was comforting. This, here, was something that he knew how to do. The upswing, the pivot, the ducking and rolling and coming up stabbing.

He lost himself to the work, and he was not surprised when it felt good.

“I wish you would take better care of yourself,” said the woman who ruled Ravatogh with an iron fist, and Cor choked on air.

Harry was in the kitchen with Dave and Aggie, prepping snacks for the visiting Auntie Mae. She was sitting in the den in the middle of Harry’s haphazard organization of baskets and yarn and books and cushions, and Harry would be upset at Cor getting blood on his things but he’d just have to deal. His sword was across the house but the woman was old, suffocation would kill her just as easily as a slit throat.

Auntie Mae raised an eyebrow. Cor clenched his hands and dug his fingernails into his palms. Harry would be upset if he killed someone in the house, let alone Auntie Mae, the kindly old woman who reminded him of his old Professor and who had been nothing but polite and helpful since the day they’d moved to Ravatogh.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Cor said eventually.

“Young man, contrary to popular belief, Titan does not carry the world on his shoulders and neither do you.” Auntie Mae did not glare, exactly; just stare until her dark eyes bore into the soul. She gestured to his arms, covered by his long-sleeve button up shirt and jacket, and Cor’s fingers twitched before he could stop himself.

He pressed as much emotion out of his voice as he could when he asked, “What gave me away?”

“You move well even with your bruises, my boy, but I’ve been on this earth far longer than you, and Hunted even longer than that.” Auntie Mae finally took her soul-judging stare away and Cor settled back into parade rest as she returned to her inspection of the room. “I reckon that young man of yours doesn’t know.”

Cor bit down on the _He’s not mine_ before it could leave his mouth. If Auntie Mae wanted to tell Harry then it wasn’t his place to counter that decision. He could only stand and stare over her shoulder and keep his hands behind his back, pressing into the bones of his own wrist so that he wouldn’t break form, and wait.

He waited for long moments – the voices in the kitchen were loud and lively, and the difference of that from the heavy air in the den was jarring – before Auntie Mae sighed. “If you don’t want to tell him, that’s fine. But if there’s one thing you take from me, let it be this.”

She stared him down, and Cor straightened, and she said in a voice that could rival King Mors’s at his most commanding, “Don’t do to yourself what you would not do to others.”

That didn’t make any sense. But Dave and Aggie were bustling into the room, cheerful and carrying trays of tea and snacks and other miscellaneous things that Cor had never understood the usage of, and Harry was on their heels, and he was smiling, and Cor had other things to pay attention to.

Auntie Mae’s words stuck in his head, played on repeat like it was a briefing set to loop. Cor turned them over in his head and tried to read what was in between, tried to understand, and came up short.

He could not ask Harry because then he would need to explain why Auntie Mae had told him this in the first place, and Cor needed to keep Harry in the dark about his nighttime activities for as long as he could. He could not tell Dave or the others that had started calling themselves the Secret Hunters because as sworn as they were to Harry, there were some things that they did not yet need to know.

Surprisingly, the answers came from Gilgamesh.

“What do you think of the kids?” he asked, when Cor had run out of things to say in his word vomit and inelegant and ungraceful and _ungrateful_ attempt to explain his thoughts. He had not stopped in his cooking, but he hadn’t ignored Cor either. Maybe there was still a way through this.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you want any of them to miss school?”

“No,” Cor said, automatically and reflexively, because he didn’t need to think about it.

“Do you want Dave or Finn or Aggie to take suicide missions?”

“ _No_ ,” Cor snapped, because Gilgamesh had asked that so casually. They might be his age and they might be orphans or son of a hunter, but they did not have his experience. They would die in the field and no one would know and no one find their _body_ , they would go unburied–

“Calm,” Gilgamesh said, and Cor sucked in a breath. Then another. “I am speaking in the hypothetical. But the idea is anathema to you, yes?”

“Yes.” He growled it out, but Gilgamesh said nothing. Just took the heavenly-smelling food off the stove and turned off the burner so that the spirit could take his eyes off it and look at Cor. The glamour was still active, but Cor remembered the impassive iron face behind it well.

“So why is it different,” Gilgamesh asked, as lightly as a courtier in the Citadel asking after the weather, “when the child in question is you?”

“Because–” it is, Cor almost said, but the look in Gilgamesh’s eye stopped him. He let the word hang in the air, the rest remaining unsaid, but the both of them knew what Cor would have added anyway.

 _Because I am a weapon made for war, and they are not_.

When the silence had drawn out for long enough that the ruckus of children coming inside startled them both, Gilgamesh said, “Think about it,” and turned back to tend to dinner. Cor watched him, watched his hands and his shoulders and his great bulk blocking one of two exits out of the kitchen, and tried to breathe out the tension in his spine like Harry had taught him.

When he had hold of himself again, he took the plates from the cabinets and the utensils from the drawers and handed them out to the younger children so that they could set the table. It was routine, easy, methodical.

He looked at them and they were too young to know how to kill, too old not to have seen someone die. They were all orphans of some kind in this house, third or fourth or fifth children or none at all.

Dave caught his eye and raised his eyebrows in silent question. Cor bit the inside of his cheek – a habit he thought he’d trained himself out of during Crownsguard basic, but apparently he was pathetic enough to lapse back into it now – and turned away.

He would ask it of himself because he had joined and trained with the Crownsguard at thirteen – lied about his age to do it, but he’d kept up with the other, older rookies of seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old, and that had to count for something – and he had worked as part of King Mors’s Crownsguard, Prince Regis’s Retinue.

He would not ask it of Dave and Finn and Aggie and the other younger kids who had discovered the gem hidden in the wilds of Cleigne, who had made their own decisions and come to their own conclusions.

They named themselves the Secret Hunters like it was some kind of in-joke (it was) and with wide-eyed irony ( _just a Hunter_ , Dave had scoffed, and it had been insulted on behalf of and not towards Harry, the only reason why Cor had not broken his nose).

Over weeks and months more people joined them, and Cor hadn’t even needed to lecture Dave more than twice about the importance of proper screening. There was Ed and Al, two refugees from Niflheim. Marnie, the prankster who they’d caught breaking into the garden for their fresh produce and who had never really left. Sonora was as silver-tongued as any Prince’s Advisor, and Odin and Peter technically still had family but Cor had recognized the look in their eye when they’d declared their parents dead. Quintus, the fifth of a house of eight sons and daughters and who had left to no consequence. Judie and Ken, the children of Hunters who had gone out and never returned.

There were enough of them now to organize them into shifts, Secret Hunters who took missions outside of Ravatogh to run messages and deliver the packages of food and clothing and steel and iron and whatever else that Harry thought people needed.

There were enough of them that Cor didn’t have to do everything himself anymore, he could teach and they would learn and they would do things in his place. He could delegate.

He spent less and less time in the field himself, but he was spending more time at the Granica House, helping wash the dishes and failing at gardening and watching Harry knit, and it was – better.

His eighteenth birthday dawned slow and quiet. Cor stared out the window of his bedroom, his katana cleaned and polished and leaning against the wall, and he watched the sun crest over the Rock.

Chatter followed soon after. The kids were getting up out of the dormitory and their laughter and their talk filled the house. Cor cracked his neck and stretched, laced his fingers and pulled them upwards until he felt his spine pop, and went to run morning exercises.

They were surprisingly well-behaved, too. He had the feeling it was only because they felt they owed him something for his birthday, but he would take what he could get.

They trudged back in, kids lightly sweaty and worn out but grinning brightly at the exercise in the crisp December air, to find that Harry had made an entire breakfast spread and insisted that Cor fill his plate first. Cor took what he needed and not another portion more, too aware of the fact that the new children in the Granica House had never seen this much food in the same place before. Centuries of war had put them into a holding pattern, but a family table filled to the brim with food was something in picture books or photographs, not in real life.

It was good, of course. Harry worried himself over spices and herbs enough that anything cooked by him always was.

The rest of the day passed the same way. It felt like he was perpetually waiting for the other shoe to drop, for a daemon to rise up out of the shadows of the Rock, for a wyvern to take flight and wreak havoc.

Nothing happened. Dusk fell, the Secret Hunters slipped back into the house one by one, and the older kids had hushed the youngers as they all gathered in the den, surrounded by towering books that had been taken down from shelves and never really returned and wicker baskets spilling over with yarn. Some of the kids were wearing the scarves and hats that Harry had knit them like badges of pride; others were making themselves at home in the cushions scattered throughout the den as though they’d never leave.

All things that Cor had never thought he would see, when he’d first been ordered by his Crownsguard superior officer that his duty was to Lucis, not to the orphans in the wreckage of the war.

“I can’t convince you otherwise,” Harry told Cor, beneath the excited murmurs of the orphans who had sought shelter beneath his wings, and Cor looked Death in the eye and nodded. “Alright then. If you’re sure.”

His heart was thumping rapid-fire in his chest, like a bird that had just seen the sweet blue sky for the first time and known it was attainable. Like the first time Cor had dipped his head and King Mors had put his scarred hand on the back of his neck and said _Yes. This one._ Like Reggie’s smile when he had just been Reggie and Cor had just been Cor, the one confusing time that they’d slipped their yokes and sat beneath the stars in a timeless moment that Cor still cherished, no matter the heartaches that had come afterward.

“I’m sure,” Cor said, and knelt to take the Oath that would swear him to the Retinue.

“Auntie Mae made it,” Harry said later, and he smiled the same smile he’d given Cor when he’d said _She reminds me of Professor McGonagall_ , the woman who’d whipped the chaos of an entire school of prepubescent children into line.

Cor lived in fear of the day that Auntie Mae decided he was a hindrance instead of a help to Harry. But the woman made damn good cake.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of the [LLF Comment Project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject), which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates feedback, including:
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